Stylistic Features Of Finance Articles In Business Week

The integration of world economy and China's entry into WTO make Chinesepeople increasingly concern for the economic situation and business trends in bothdomestic and international markets. In order to get timely business information in theworld, they feel the urge to be able to read original English business newspapers andjournals. Many higher education institutions have already set up courses such asEnglish Newspaper Reading and Finance English Reading. How to select and developteaching materials to cater for different needs of students with diverse majorbackground and language level has become a practical problem to these coursedesigners. It requires the course designers and textbook compilers to study languagefeatures of various English economic journals and determine whether they areappropriate reading materials for students in view of their different backgrounds.Course teachers, who are expected to give students guidance to effective reading, alsoneed to conduct discourse analysis on such journalistic articles in order to have a deepunderstanding of the stylistic features.Business week, founded by McGraw-Hill Companies in 1930, is one of worldleading journals specialized in business management and finance. A stylistic analysisof the articles in Finance Section of Business Week is necessary for material selectionand development of Finance English Reading Course and also conducive to readingcomprehension of such journalistic articles.The dissertation adopts functional grammar as major theory framework.Respectively on the scale rank of word, group and clause complex, it conductsdiscourse analysis and statistic description on 30 sample articles, which total morethan 30,000 words and, on the basis of the sample statistics, deduces and estimatesparameter of the population. The research shows that basically the wording ofjournalistic articles in finance section of Business Week is in compliance with thegeneral principle of conciseness and vividness of journalistic language, but there are aconsiderable number of jargons and proper nouns. The types of interdependency ofthe sentences are comparatively simple;projection accounts for a large proportion inlogic-semantic relation, which meets the requirement of clear attribution. Thetransitivity analysis reveals that material process, mental process and relationalprocess make up 90% of the all and they are in balanced proportions, which indicatesthat such articles belong to soft news – analytic features. A brief modulation studymanifests the objectivity of such articles and journalists' respect to readers. Statisticson theme show experiential themes and unmarked themes are dominant, whichhighlight the topic and present a brisk and informative look. And few interpersonalthemes make the article look more objective. In the last part of the body, thedissertation analyzes the first sentence and the lead types of the sample articles anddiscovers that lead usually contains more than one paragraph and the main idea isoften not stated at the beginning of the articles.In the conclusion of the dissertation, the author answers the 4 questions raised inthe introduction based on the summary of research findings:1. Do finance articles in Business Week have unique stylistic features? In what waythey are similar with or different from other journalistic articles?2. What could pose difficulties for Chinese students in understanding such articles?(or what background, either in language or in business, should the readers possessin understanding such articles?)3. Is it appropriate for such articles to be adopted as part of teaching materials inFinance English Reading Course?4. Suppose such articles are adopted as in-class teaching materials of FinanceEnglish Reading Course, what should teachers focus in classroom teaching?The end of the dissertation points out the limitation of the research and putsforward suggestions for further studies.